Acknowledging the Past to Progress into the Future Anonymous College

Why is history an essential core class in the American school curriculum? The phrase ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’ is a surface-level answer to such question. The past formulates the ingredients for the future, which emphasizes how valuing history is as important as valuing the present. Through reading historical literature, society today can realize how history is simply repeating itself in front of their eyes. This is evident when analyzing the writings with each other since one would anticipate human progress to be identified. However, this is not the case when comparing Francis Bacon’s “Idols of the Mind” and Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Written in the 17th century, “Idols of the Mind” explained theoretical concepts that hindered humans from progressing. Bacon elaborated on the idea of four main idols through the following groups: tribe, cave, market, and drama. Each of these idols highlighted a different aspect of human failure, deriving from possessing faulty human relationships and misconceptions that inhibit absorbing information. The four idols detailed in Francis Bacon’s “Idols of the Mind” pointed out the issue of how narrow-minded humans constitute to why...